For me an area that Silverlight can streak ahead of <other browser pluggin name here> is on the business apps. I am not just talking about displaying data (which is SL 1.0 stuff) I want two way CRUD type operations. I mean we create our data tier with entity framework, and we then create partial classes which include our business rules, validation etc These partial classes and therefore our business rules can run both in the data and the client tier without the client having to go over the wire to do validation etc. and the data persists in the client by some means that when it is sent back to the server it can handle concurrency and only changes are sent back. But this should happen out of the box we should not have to manually code this type of stuff because our entity model has all the scheme/ meta data to generate both server and client side code. I guess this is more of a Visual studio wish rather than a SL wish.

I think there are many business, my customers included, who have users who enter large volumes of data, such as an accounting app and lets face it even with ajax a browser based data entry app is just painfull for novice users. So they are still churning out thick clients. I think if SL can deliver to the developers a means of creating these data entry type apps easily and SL already has the benefit of a single language client and server side, we will see a standard business app foundation emerge.

Create a better CollectionView that uses LINQ and provides thread-safe updates. Like Continuous LINQ (in Codeplex). Include new XAML objects to create a LINQ query from mark-up.

A client side MVC framework.would be nice.

H.264 support for video.

More granular permission system. Let a SL page ask for permission to access specific named resources on a machine (e.g. address book, email, local server etc). Use a token mechanism to store the user’s response.

Microsoft needs to quickly figure out how to provide 3d. Maybe they need to deliver with DirectX for Windows then suck up their pride and deliver it using OpenGL for other platforms. There’s not doubt Flash will be/ is working towards this too (i.e. papervision3d etc) but at least then you’re both fighting for the future edge rather than just playing catch up.

For those of us who cannot require .NET 3.0 on the client, but are able to leverage Silverlight in the meantime… a C++ (ATL / MFC) wrapper for hosting the Silverlight runtime. Make it really easy to interop to / from C++ directly with the Silverlight DOM, bypassing the HTML DOM. Ideally, enable running Silverlight apps as standalone apps…

> None of this not being able to query the actual x, y, width, height after XAML render transforms / storyboards slobber all over it. Don’t want to hear "the whole point is that the render takes care of it so you don’t HAVE to know…." yeah, tell that to my 10 years of procedural code hacks that work their magic. Make storyboards learn to play nice, not go all ‘rendition’ on everything they touch. Then maybe we’ll start using them more when we want to do stuff sexier or more fun than just business RIA.

Give us those things, and there ain’t nothing we can’t build one way or another.

BTW, It’s amazing how much Silverlight has jumped up from 1.0 to 2.0 beta in under a year. Even with 2.0 beta 1, you guys are getting RIA covered nicely, but we gotta start making it super slick as well. But you guys are doing an absolutely incredible job, mad props.

Performance, performance, performance… I’m talking UI performance here (I know the compiled .NET will be fast). And… why the heck do you need to have version 3.0, start adding features as soon as you can. Have a 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, etc. Why wait another 2 years to get there? And also adjust the feature set as you go, tweak what you have, fix as you go… be agile!!

In current implementation, we cannot provide consistent behavior for keyboard operation between host browser and plug-in objects; When a SL plugin has forcus, an user cannot use familiar operation such as Ctrl-N(Win)/Cmd-N(Mac) for new window, Ctrl-Tab(WinIE)/Ctrl-PgDn(WinFireFox)/Cmd-Shift-Right(MacSafari) for next tab and so on.

I would very happy if I could use DefWndProc() like function to return unhandled events to host browser with cross platform.

4) clipboardData.getData and setData (Yes, I know it that IE can use clipboard by JScript. but other web browser can not do it. We can use clipboard in any web browser by power of Flash. Why only Flash?)

Flash has many problems for serious RIA development but the biggest one is lack of synchronous code execution which leads to a massive maintenance overhead (tried to follow code in Flex in an enterprise app? Impossible!)

For developing RIAs you simply want to develop a "desktop" app and split the code between presentation/server using attributes or an MVC framework. Let the compiler generate the glue, not the developer.

While you are at, why not look at ver 4.0. For heaven sake, release Ver2.0 before getting on to Ver 3.0. Do you hear a sign of frustration. You bet & so are milliosn fo other developers. Developers stay with MS because their financial livlihood is tied to MS (one reason) but MS better get smart soon!!

Well I’m providing this feedback because I care so don’t get me wrong.

Any sort of lower latency audio/video streaming option would be huge. One thing that is blaringly absent from _any_ Windows Media component is low-latency streaming (sub 1 second would be a great start)

If silverlight had this feature, our entire company and thousands of our customers would be using it as quickly as we could kick Windows Media Player to the curb.

Can you please update the efficiency of the audio codec in Silverlight 3.0? If you have anything equal to or ***better- especially at low bitrates- to WIndows Media Audio 10 Professional – I would be in Microsoft HEAVEN! And, if possible- support for 24BIT audio at higher bitrates 🙂

On of the areas I would like to see enhancements in is imaging. The ability to pre-process (resize, crop) an image on the client so it can upload to a backend sevice for priniting. It is currently a waste of bandwidth uploading 10meg images to print/process a image than only needs to be 500k. This would improve the client experience on any site they upload images. ie a picture for their blog etc. The current image control is very limited, much like it’s html counterpart.

It would be nice to load this functionality as an on-demand loaded library rather than as the core componant to keep the low silverlight size. Although with the large number of people on broadband, the current 4meg download in very, very small when you consider this component is ment to stream HD video.

One of the major common issues that is raised is wpf/silverlight compatability. This area needs a strong focus in 3.0.

These wishlists are awesome. I just thought I would follow up to again thank you for the feature requests etc, and I have taken these in many times to planning meetings with the teams to work out where things land and if they are possible to implement.

Keep them coming, nothing is stupid and everything is welcomed. I will follow-up if I may with some folks here to get some deeper insights into some of the requests to make sure I’ve got them fleshed out more.

This would apply to all requests above: We understand that download size of Silverlight is a concern. But this is no reason to leave features out of the release completly. So for example : include a seperate assembly which we can reference when we need to include hardware support in our applications (such as webcam). In other words exactly the same approach as desktop. Yes I realize that this will still add SOME overhead to the plugin but is better than not having this support at all.

2.) Basic database support (not over web-services). I would love to take pre-existing code and bind it to Silverlight grids instead of Asp.Net grids at my workplace. I know this probably won’t happen, but if Silverlight gets bindable data objects I’ll dance with joy (like, a data reader or data table) .

3.) More standard controls.

4.) Better designer (the RC1 SDK is a step in the right direction). I want a WinForms type ease that I can put business applications out with quickly (and it would be nice to have #2 with that instead of web services for speed alone).

3. Add some method for inheritance of the element name and data context. In WPF you can use Freezables as discussed here to accomplish this. If you add a new mechanism for accomplishing this same affect, please add it to both WPF and Silverlight. This tends to be very important in nontrivial applications.

4. Add custom markup extensions. These should match the WPF implementation, such that one can get access to the parser info, etc. One big problem I have right now is that there is now way to resolve a Type in Xaml. This is problematic when trying to use a DI container to compose a UI.

5. Add DrawingBrush

II. Wants (aka I’ll be very happy with the next version)

1. A mechanism for low-level, high performance drawing. aka. drawing context or a tleast geometries

2. WPF’s Pixel Shaders

3. Offline support (waiting to see what PDC reveals, but MESH integration would probably be good enough if it worked cross platform)

(4. RenderTargetBitmap)

III. Dreams (aka I jump up and scream praises of the next version)

1. Hardware Acceleration

2. 3D

Just a note that Flash/Flex/Air has some amount of all the features in category II and III.

In general, my opinoin is that Microsoft should only build it if I cannot build it on top of the platform. Strengthening the core enables me to do much more impressive things than adding tons of controls, for example. In my experience, the higher level the framework Microsoft tries to build, the more wrong they tend to get it. So, if you stick to strengthening the foundations then I think you open up a lot more possibilities and run less risk of bloating the framework with stuff that people won’t use. Trust the community to add the higher level pieces.

I could list more stuff, but I wanted to keep it short and sweet by pointing out things that I could use most or would be excited to see in a future version. I’m sure you’ve heard most of this before, but I just want to cast another vote.

We’re currently working on a SL 2 game. I love the environment, but here are things that would make life significantly easier:

– the ability to build class libraries that create controls and share them between SL and WPF applications. For example, our game code that renders scenes etc is built in Silverlight. If I could reuse those controls insiide a WPF level editor, my productivity would shoot through the roof.

– Blending modes! The addition of at least additive blending would greatly expand the kind of effects we could create. Currently any ‘light based’ effect, lightning, fire etc doesn’t work properly with the one (compositing) blend mode available.

– Hardware support for bitmap effects like we now have in WPF.

– The ability to get and set pixel data, so that we can a) easily create dynamic images, and b) use image data for something other than rendering – navigation paths, height maps for example.

We also need guidance on building an end-to-end line of business (LOB) application that documents best practices in handling/storing/retrieving data. The guidance should not assume that the the developer is using SQL Server or Entity Framework all of the time. Many of us want to build a SL front end for data access layers that connect to Oracle, MySQL, etc.

I know we have deep zoom for images and the like but it would be nice to have a zoom in and out for all controls (including user defined ones). In this way we can provide the ability for users to zoom in and out giving more controls – or fitting more controls on a given screen. Kind of like the zoom in surface